Syria Part 2

The "weakened West"? I think not

The American Response: When Barack Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian armed forces was a "red line" that would force the US to intervene, and then proceeded not to intervene when said weapons were used, many were quick to seize on his indecision as an example of a now impotent America. They claimed this former big stick wielding giant could no longer influence the world the way it has in the past. Unsurprisingly, many of these critics were woefully under-informed, or outright misinformed or ignorant, regarding the Syrian conflict in the first place. If protecting the Syrian people was such a big issue for these people, then why weren't they decrying supposed US cowardice from the start of this war, where conventional weapons had already killed thousands of civilians far prior to the use of chemical arms? Part of it was just cynical political posturing by people already opposed to Obama for a variety of other reasons, but there is a dangerous undercurrent of amnesia and outright ignorance regarding recent US military forays into the Middle East that certainly seems to affect some of these critics. All Western airstrikes in Libya succeeded in doing was speeding up the exit of a despot already on his last legs so the country could be left a patchwork of militia fiefdoms and lawlessness. In Iraq, where not even hundreds of thousands of Western troops and trillions of Western dollars could succeed in building something resembling Republican democracy or fostering real stability, we've already seen more deaths from suicide bombings and sectarian violence this year than in any year since 2008. The country's Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi fled the country last year and has yet to return following being hit with a death sentence for allegedly organizing and funding "death squads" made up of militant Sunni partisans and targeting prominent Shi'ites in the government for assassination. Depending on who you believe, the charges against him may be baseless and simply part of an effort by Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to get rid of Hashemi, but either way it doesn't reflect well at all on the country's leaders. If it weren't for the absolute mess in Syria, the virtual collapse of the Iraqi state would be a much bigger story right now.

Taking this all into account, I think it's hard to argue that forgoing direct intervention in Syria at this point wasn't the right decision. Many disagree with this assertion, and it's not that I don't think their concerns are valid. In an editorial piece in the September 21st issue of The Economist, I think this opposing view was summed up pretty well in this paragraph: "Now every tyrant knows that a red line set by the leader of the Free World is really just a threat to ask legislators how they feel about enforcing it. Dictators will be freer to maim and murder their own people, proliferators like North Korea less scared to proceed with spreading WMD, China and Russia ever more content to test their muscles in the vacuum left by the West." While this is a more articulate description of the concerns of Syrian interventionists than what was said by some of our elected officials, I think it suffers from some of the same amnesia that less articulate arguments have been rife with. Rogue regimes, especially North Korea, have proven time and again that they aren't intimidated by military force, especially when it doesn't come close to affecting them directly. Western armies have been mucking around in the Middle East on a near non-stop basis since Desert Storm. It hasn't stopped President Assad from aping the brutal tactics of his Father, it hasn't stopped Hezbollah from backing him up and continuing to antagonize Israel, and it sure as hell hasn't had an effect on a North Korean regime which gains a good portion of its country's GDP trafficking arms, counterfeiting Dollars and Euros, and producing and trafficking methamphetamine on an industrial scale. I think the true power of the West, particularly America, to influence the Middle East was outlined quite succintly by Michael Wahid Hanna, a senior fellow at The Century Institute, in a recent interview with Vice News focusing on the current troubles in Egypt. "The United States can't dictate political outcomes in the Middle East...however they still play a central role that nobody else can fill." When the Balkans were torn apart by civil war in the '90s, it wasn't Russia or China who facilitated talks between warring factions (in Dayton, Ohio of all places) and helped put an end to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In the '70s, '80s and '90s it wasn't Russia or China who got Israel and a litany of countries, which spent the better part of the Cold War trying to wipe them off the map, communicating, trading, and even in some cases cooperating with one another. None of the countries in the Middle East currently getting billions from Russia and/or China are led by people naive or crazy enough to look at their relationship as anything more than a marriage of convenience, and though Russia has stepped in to help secure the Assad regime's chemical weaponry, no one is looking to their leaders to provide a cogent, realistic solution that will stop the fighting. It's not their M.O., and it never has been. The US, on the other hand, was working to help end conflicts like the Russo-Japanese war long before the post-World War Two era when we ascended to "hyperpower" status and such tasks were more or less forced on our government by default. The West is not weak, it's simply somewhat preoccupied as of late due to economic crises in Europe and political infighting and douchebaggery in America. It should be a priority for both major American political parties and the leaders of nations like Germany and the UK to work to promote negotiations between not only the warring factions in Syria, but the outside regimes mentioned in the last post fueling the broader Sunni/Shia conflict in so many areas. It would surely be an arduous process, but if they still don't realize it after the last decade any President of the United States should have this tattooed on their forehead: The United States can't dictate political outcomes in the Middle East. Or anywhere else in the world, really, except maybe Albania which regularly petitions us to become a State. Anyway, from an objective standpoint, which failure would be more of a headache to deal with: "We tried long and hard to get these people to talk to each other they didn't want to...it sucks, gas prices are probably going to go up, sorry", or having to explain to Americans that for some reason we failed yet again to bring freedom and democracy to a country with guns and bombs, the economy is further fucked because of it, oh and gas prices are gonna go up too...

A big old graph is always useful when you're engaging in calculated fearmongering.

Israel has been largely unaffected by the war in Syria, and their concerns, while valid, should have little impact on the West's response: Ah, Benjamin Netanyahu. I always found it funny that even though Netanyahu and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad played the role of each other's prime nemesis, they both rose to power thanks to support from the most bellicose, reactionary and frightened segments of their respective electorates. Both are former military men who not only made it clear they'd never really returned to a civilian mindset, they had no intention of trying. The narrative of a State of Israel constantly under siege is and has been very beneficial to Netanyahu's political career, just as the notion that a strong Iranian state was the one thing keeping Sunni terrorists and American soldiers from overrunning the Middle East was a boon for Ahmadinejad and his political allies. Much of Israel's current Syria policy is based on the close relationship Assad's government has with Iran's leaders. In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post, outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, made it clear that Israel's number one goal regarding Syria is to get President Assad out of power, even if it empowers groups linked to Al-Qaeda in the country. "The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [Syrian President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran...
We understand that they are pretty bad guys. Not everyone in the opposition is a bad guy. Still, the greatest danger to Israel was by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran to Damascus, to Beirut.
And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria.
With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go." To me, this sounds disturbingly similar to the short-sighted Syria policy currently being enacted by Saudi Arabia. They see the current Iran-Hezbollah-Assad axis as the paramount threat in the region while refusing to acknowledge that Syria could easily remain just as much of a problem, if not more of one, under the rule of groups like ISIS. Oren himself points out in the same interview that fairly sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry found its way into the hands of multiple enemies of the Israeli state following the Libyan civil war, and while Syria is hardly a military juggernaut they possess even larger arms caches and newer, better maintained weaponry than Col. Gaddafi's forces did. It would be foolhardy not to expect the same sort of thing to happen, right across their border this time, if Assad is removed in a manner that leaves a power vacuum in Syria. There are those in the Israeli government and military that currently like to promote the idea that the clash between Assad's forces and rebels with ranks largely made up of Islamists who don't think Israel should even exist is doing the job of weakening two of their enemies at the same time, though to his credit Oren doesn't seem to be one of them. He doesn't explicitly go against the Netanyahu administration's policy in the in the interview, but he does elude to the fact that Israel underestimated just how chaotic the war in Syria would become. Israel's leaders would do well to look at other nations bordering Syria like Turkey and Jordan that have been flooded with refugees and had stray artillery shells fired from Syria land on their citizens homes. Having a failed state right next door is never helpful, regardless of how awful its current ruler may be.

The notion that the Assad regime may try to galvanize support from other Muslims, or simply sow more chaos in the region, by openly attacking Israel has been floated by some. Conveniently, those promoting this view rarely bring up the fact that Israel has been able to attack Syria with impunity multiple times during the civil war, and has yet to face any serious blowback for their actions. These strikes have all occurred when the Israeli military believed Assad's forces were getting ready to move weapons to Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon, and were by all accounts successful in their objectives. If the Assad regime was actually set on, or capable of a significant attack on Israeli soil, wouldn't they have already engaged in some sort of direct retaliation following one of these strikes? It seems clear that this notion is just another example of the typical fearmongering engaged in by Netanyahu and his cabinet. As evidenced by the words of Mr. Oren and others, the Israeli government now seeks to lump Assad and Hezbollah in with Iran as "existential threats", the sort of threats that they'll need backing from their American ally to take on. Not only is it in no way fair for the Israelis to insist that no one in the Mideast they have disagreements with should be allowed to have nuclear power, it's also unrealistic and impossible for Israel to maintain its status as the region's only nuclear-armed power indefinitely. Netanyahu needs to stop relying on US pressure to accomplish Israeli policy goals they themselves are incapable of advancing. Outside powers aren't going to be anymore successful in preventing the spread of nuclear arms to Iran and other Middle Eastern states than they were in preventing India, Pakistan and North Korea from going nuclear. This technology has existed since 1945, and it's just as foolish to think we can keep it from spreading as it is to think we could place a moratorium on smartphones or the internet in some part of the world. The Israelis need to face up to the fact that they'll likely have more than one nuclear-armed neighbor within the next few decades, and adjust their policies accordingly. Regardless of whether the next administration in the White House is Republican or Democrat, it's likely that the US will continue to relax its policy of exceptionalism toward Israel because it's simply not realistic anymore no matter what political perspective you're coming from. A nation that accounts for a fraction of the people and land area in the Middle East cannot and should not be responsible for dictating what is and what is not allowed in a region of such importance to the world at large.

The majority of Kurdish rebel groups include female fighters.

The continuing plight of the Kurds: Just as in neighboring Iraq, chaos in Syria has seemingly afforded the nation's Kurdish population a chance to assert their autonomy following years of repression. Many cite an uprising in 2004 in the Kurdish-dominated city of Qamishlo as the genesis of the current Kurdish rebel movement in Syria, but it wasn't until the government was forced to pull troops out of Kurdish areas in Northern Syria in 2011 to deal with strife in other areas that Kurdish militias became the de facto power in parts of of the North. Unlike their Iraqi brethren though, Syria's Kurds aren't sitting on billions of dollars in oil and natural gas. Syria is one of the most resource devoid countries in the Middle East, and its Northern areas are no exception. They also lack the isolation from chaos that is present in Iraqi Kurdistan. Since the US invasion in 2003, northern Iraq has almost operated as an independent nation. Their leaders are able to sign off on oil exploration deals with foreign companies independent of central government supervision, and while Syria's Kurds are protected by one of the country's largest militias, they aren't near as well-armed, well-fed and well-trained as the famed Peshmerga in Iraq. All of this would lead one to believe that the current autonomy enjoyed by Syria's Kurdish-majority areas is fleeting, and it seems the Assad regime is well aware of this. This hasn't stopped the YPG, Syria's largest Kurdish militia, from clashing with regime forces, but they certainly aren't allied with any major rebel faction. The YPG has also clashed with rebel groups in the northern towns of Ras al-Ain and Azaz, along with Kurdish areas of Aleppo. Lines of communication between the regime and the YPG remain open, Syria's Alawite leadership has always been adept at cultivating support from the Kurds and the Assyrian Christians, or Syriacs, the country's other main minority groups. The message the Assad regime is selling them is that even though years of repression under the President and his father weren't great, life under a hardline Islamist regime would be downright unbearable. This has led to allegations by some rebel groups that the Kurds are openly in league with Assad, beginning a cycle of tit-for-tat beheadings and other such atrocities involving the YPG and rebel factions such as ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front. Just like the main conflict between the regime and the rebels, the current Kurdish situation in Syria is beyond complicated. For a time, it did look as if the Kurds and Syriacs may enjoy more a stake in a new Syria, but as the conflict drags on that looks less likely every day. Syrian and Iraqi Christians have been fleeing their native land for decades, and have long-established immigrant communities in places like Australia and Canada. The process has sped up even more in the past ten years or so before growing to a full-on diaspora where Syria is concerned, and both of the most recent Popes made a number of public pleas for help on behalf of the Arab Christian population. It doesn't appear as if the leadership of most Middle Eastern nations gave a damn. Thousands of Kurdish refugees have already joined their more prosperous kin in Iraq, and thousands more have streamed across the border into Turkey, a country whose historical record when it comes to repressing the Kurds is probably even worse than Syria's. Turkey is far more stable and economically well-off than Syria however, and it appears many Kurds will put aside a historical enmity simply to raise their kids in an environment where they don't have to worry about suicide bombers and stray mortars. I do think that the Kurds will remain somewhat of a force in Syria, but any notion of gaining the same sort of power they enjoy in Iraq is a pipe dream. The YPG and its allies are going to be forced to go all in with either the regime or the rebels at some point, and will likely still be economically and politically marginalized in Syria following the end of the war. Such is life for the Kurds. Same as it ever was...
Sources:

Vice article on the YPG: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/meet-the-ypg 
Article on August 19th clashes between the YPG and Islamist rebels: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/aug/19/world/la-fg-wn-syrian-refugees-kurds-20130819 
Interview with Ambassador Michael Oren: http://www.jpost.com/Features/Front-Lines/Diplomacy-Obama-passes-the-kishka-test-326570 
In-depth piece on Israel's January 30th strike on Syria:   http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/east-side-story/why-did-israel-attack-syria-now-and-why-did-the-syrians-admit-it.premium-1.500708
Article on the current situation at the Israeli-Syrian border: http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-israel-syria-20131011,0,4126292.story#axzz2ilfeZypy
Opinion piece-"Obama's Syria war is really about Iran and Israel": http://www.thenation.com/blog/176040/obamas-syria-war-really-about-iran-and-israel#
Article on the charges levied against Iraq's Vice President: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/01/us-iraq-hashemi-idUSBRE8A00TJ20121101
"Syriac Christians, Kurds boost cooperation in Syria": http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/06/syria-syriacs-assyrians-kurds-pyd.html
Wikipedia overview of Kurdish rebels across the Middle East: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshmerga
Opinion piece- "Netanyahu's lost battles against the West on nuclear Iran":  http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/contents/articles/opinion/2013/10/netanyahu-yaalon-israel-iaf-iran-nuclear-uranium-bomb.html